wireless

iPad was announced by Apple on 27th of January 2010 and 4 days ago, the first day of each release in the US market it made 300.000 sales in only one day. It seems though that after the criticism Apple received about the design and functionalities of the device on many websites on the Internet, reputation problems keep appearing for the company, related with iPad.

A very serious problem was revealed related with the ability of iPad to connect to wireless networks which support more than one protocol at the same time (802.11 protocols). Apple already released information on how to temporarily solve the problem, such as upgrading the router, choosing only one protocol (e.g. 802.11g or 802.11n) etc. The problem raises additional reputation concerns to the company, so if problems keep arising the credibility of Apple is at stake.

Since Microsoft Windows Vista became available in the market, all my friends started asking me about a problem through which their computer isn’t able to access a local network while putting the network cable on or while trying to connect through wireless connection.

In both cases, the reason is a change between the “old way” (the Windows XP SP2 one) and the “new way” (the Windows Vista one) through which the computer obtains a new address automatically from the device responsible for routing the network. Microsoft published a support article about that problem on the 17th of June 2008 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233). As stated in the article, the user has to disable the BROADCAST flag by editing the registry of the operating system since the problem is caused by routers which don’t support that new option.

Most of my friends wouldn’t want to edit the registry on their own since it is quite dangerous if they are not careful to easily destroy their operating system installation. So, instead of editing the registry, a very handy tool was developed by Johnathan Yew called DHCP Fix Tool. The most recent version of the tool can be found following this link while the instructions are quite clear (copy-paste from the original site):

1. Click on “Query Adapter” to get the list of network adapters in your system.

2. Select the adapter you wish to fix. Reboot your system and see if you can get an IP from DHCP.

3. If you wish to undo the fix, select the adapter and choose “Reset to Vista Default”.